Every hiring manager and every company make the claim that their software developers love working there. But all too often, these claims fly in the face of reality. It isn’t that managers don’t care what makes their developers satisfied; it’s that often, they simply don’t know. So, why should developer happiness be the holy grail for a good manager, and how do they get there?

Good Developers Are Hard to Find

From single entrepreneurs to top 500 companies, nearly every modern business utilizes software. As a result, the job market for developers has never been hotter. If your developers are good at what they do but aren't happy where they are, they will have ample opportunity to move to greener pastures.

If your strategy is to plan on, or even welcome, some level of employee burnout, think again. The long-term effects of high turnover rates wreak havoc on a company: remaining employees have to overwork to compensate and a lengthy hiring and training process is necessary for each new developer you bring on board.

A development team that’s engaged beyond the bottom line offers more long-term value. Each team member brings more than their coding abilities to the table; developers are skilled workers with unique and diverse knowledge bases. Plus, finding people who integrate well into your existing team is harder than it might seem; one study showed that when team familiarity increased by 50%, defects decreased by 19% and deviations from budget declined by 30%.

The longer a team stays together at your company, the better your return on investment.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Good developers know how much their time is worth. If the only area where you’re competitive is salary, there will always be another company willing to give them a 10% raise.

However, once their base financial needs are satisfied, and once the allure of free massages and ping-pong tables begins to wear off, the path to job satisfaction has some concrete stepping stones.

Business thinker Daniel Pink has identified three main factors that help employees feel happy and productive:

Autonomy, having freedom and control over one's actions.

Mastery, the satisfaction of being an expert on a particular subject.

Purpose, the feeling that one's actions have true meaning and impact upon the world.

The sum total of these three factors—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—is a sense of empowerment. Software development teams that are empowered, whether they use agile software development or some other software project management system, are motivated to perform well, and produce better software.

Happy Developers Are Good Developers

Among all of your company's staff, developers are especially notable for the direct link between their work and your organization’s success. A well-developed, well-maintained software project can be a milestone that puts your business on the map or doubles the number of clients that you work with in a year.

The top software companies have long since stopped asking themselves whether it's worth it to improve the happiness of their development teams. Instead, they ask, "How can we make our developers as happy as possible?" These organizations cultivate a company culture where the opinions and contributions of developers are valued, and where developers are given significant opportunities for creativity and flexibility.

Software developers are motivated by the pleasure of experimenting and learning new things and devoting their gray matter to solving hard problems. Rather than treating your developers as code monkeys fixing GitHub issues in a cold, windowless basement, take the time to make them feel involved in the rest of the company.

Give them the freedom to dabble with and learn about new tools and technologies.

Involve them in long-term strategy planning sessions.

Let them see the impact of their work by tracking their projects' performance and giving them feedback from satisfied customers.

Study after study shows that happy developers are productive, motivated, and effective developers. And that has benefits not only for them, but for everyone else on staff, and for the performance of your company.

Final Thoughts

It's important to remember that keeping your developers happy should be an ongoing project. Each developer is unique and needs different things to be happy, from a new workstation to a good work-life balance, so be willing to accommodate these requests as they arise.

Above all, trust your software development team and give them the tools they need to do their jobs well. We built ZenHub to do everything prescribed in this article; it takes all of our typical project management tools (kanban boards, reporting, and more) into GitHub, empowering developers in the environment that they’re most comfortable in. This also benefits managers, who enjoy speed, transparency, and frictionless collaboration with the development team.

Improving the happiness and well-being of your developers is an investment that, in the long term, will pay back massive dividends for your business.